The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  Pip’s eyes were narrowed, but ze didn’t interrupt.

  Fift had given up any pretense of sleeping or doing homework in zir other two bodies. Ze was just sitting around, watching zirself over the feed. Ze scratched zir other body’s nose and looked at zirself. Zir flabby, smallish, mud-colored bodies, zir tangled short white hair. Ze stood up from the bed and went to put some clothes on.

  Hrotrun screwed up vir face. “I was just having some fun. I’d heard there was going to be—we’d all heard about the Cirque, and that the Ticket Holders were wandering around the up and across . . . I had a friend who could get me an anonybody, so I just . . . showed up.”

  “Hundreds of anonybodies, and you all just happened to show up and seek out Panaximandra and have a riot by accident?” Fift said.

  {Your approach is very odd, Fift.} Pip sent. Ze was studying Hrotrun’s face. {But go ahead and conduct your experiment, if that is what will satisfy you.} How like Pip to belatedly approve of what ze couldn’t stop!

  “Well that’s where the anonybodies were. When we stepped into them, I mean. It was . . . a very strange feeling. And then . . . Panaximandra . . .” Hrotrun swallowed. “Ve came, looking like something out of an epic, so . . . powerful.” Hrotrun cleared vir throat, vir eyes moist again with tears. “And it was all . . . true. What ve said.” Ve blinked, dislodging a tear onto the smooth slope below vir eye: it slid down and lost itself among the brown feathers on vir cheek. Behind vir pleading look there was an edge of hatred.

  It wasn’t how you look at someone fragile who needs to be protected, who you unfortunately hurt in your wildness. It was how you look at someone who controls you, who owns you, who supplants you at every turn.

  It was Father Miskisk looking at Mother Pip.

  “You hit me . . . because I was a Staid,” Fift said, amazed.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Hrotrun snapped. “We don’t hit Staids, do we? We don’t even speak harshly to you; we don’t want to distress your perfect equilibrium with our ridiculous feelings. No, we just listen to you explain to us why we shouldn’t be feeling anything, and follow your excellent advice. We just clown for your amusement and service you sexually and build your”—ve gestured violently at Fullbelly, arm stiff—“safe, clean, sensible . . . lapine warrens . . . mortuary libraries . . . parking spaces where we all keep our voices down and wait in line and do our . . . work. And occasionally we might be allowed to see a child . . .” Vir voice broke. “Ooh, look, a child! Passing by . . . or of course we can just watch them over the feed. Not that we could have an interactive simulation of course—no, that’s too old-fashioned and dangerous and foolish. We can just sit by the feed watching the public byways. Ooh, look, a child! Or the mats—yes, of course, because there must be some space for Vails, mustn’t there, it’s only sensible; fighting is ridiculous, of course, but Vails have needs, so let’s give them a little space they can go and not bother anyone while they do it, meaning not bother Staids; but of course we have to make an appointment oh-so-carefully in advance, and make sure everyone agrees about when and why and how much we can punch each other. A parody of the Kumru-spurned Long Conversation, that’s what the mats are!”

  Fift was at a loss. Zir audience was spiking; ten thousand live viewers, most of them just arrived in the last few seconds. A dozen were accredited reactants, and two entertainment-aggregation agencies had upped their ratings of this part of the feed since Hrotrun began speaking.

  There were a number of recommendations from somewhat-strangers of various connection levels crowding Fift’s incoming queue. Suggestions of what to ask, complaints, theories, rants . . .

  Pip cleared zir throat, sharply.

  Hrotrun’s eyes narrowed, and ve smirked. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t ask for what you don’t want to hear. Anyway, that’s why we were there. All right? I got in an anonybody on a lark, and ended up in a crowd, and Panaximandra told us the truth about our lives; and then I got carried away. I strayed”—ve put a sarcastic edge on the word—“from the path that you wonderful clear thinkers, and the wonderful Midwives and adjudicators and reactant-aggregators, have laid out for us. I was muddled and confused. All right? But remember that I’m just a poor little Vail, and we live by emotion and action, and so in a confusing situation like that, you know, it’s hard for us to not get carried away. So I’m sorry. Are we done?”

  Pip looked dour. Ze didn’t need to send anything for Fift to know what ze was thinking. The spider has escaped the playpit, zir expression said. We will have to settle for an insincere formal apology, and we will look like fools.

  Fift cleared zir throat. “You seem really . . . tied up in this whole Staid and Vail thing.”

  Hrotrun almost choked. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You seem like . . . you think everything wrong with your life is Staids’ fault, right?”

  “Oh, please,” Hrotrun said, contemptuously. “From citizen investigator to Idyll introspectionist. If you haven’t learned anything from what I said, you are incapable of it. Now let us end this.”

  “But,” Fift said, doggedly, “you’re a Far Historical index design technician . . .”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Do you even know what that is, by the way?”

  “I know what Far History is,” Fift said, though zir idea of it was vague. The Ages Before the Ages . . . incomprehensible differences in thinking, partially bridged by incomprehensibly sophisticated automated processes . . . Then ze thought of what Thavé had said: that’s how you all got here in the first place. “It’s . . . before people came to the world. All the other worlds people lived on before.”

  “Yes, yes,” Hrotrun said, softening a little. “What we know of them—what we can know of them. Much of what we have is just data—it hardly deserves to be called information, much less knowledge. And much of the supposed knowledge is generated by Far Theoretical engines which are themselves almost incomprehensibly strange. Which is where indexing comes in . . .” Ve caught vemself beginning to lecture and tightened vir lips in a thin smile. “Not that anyone cares about that anymore.”

  {Fift, that is enough.} Pip sent. {This line of inquiry is not appropriate.}

  “But Vail and Staid . . .” Fift felt a rush of blood to zir face. Ze avoided looking at Pip. It was a stupid thing to ask; ze’d lost the thread of what ze’d been trying to do. But one of the messages in zir incoming queue, from one of the Staid admirers zir brush with fame had generated—one Dobroc P., who Fift had accepted contact from because Dobroc was somehow connected to Father Thurm—Dobroc had asked, and the question had struck Fift. It was a daring question; and it was suddenly, somehow, Fift’s own question. So, despite the blood pounding in zir ears, ze asked it: “. . . I mean, there didn’t used to be Vail and Staid. In Far History, I mean. So how can . . . how can it all be about . . . that?”

  Pip tensed.

  Hrotrun smirked. “There were always Vail and Staid, in the sense that there were always the quick and the sluggish. What is new is all the frippery we put around it. And that frippery, my dear child—all the Midwives’ theories about harmony and balance and two fundamental poles of human being? It’s all to protect the sluggish. I don’t suppose they teach you that in school.” Vir shoulders unhunched and ve ran vir fingers through the iridescent feathers behind vir ears. For a moment, something else penetrated the bland, generic, smooth surface of Hrotrun’s somatic design—something haggard, bony, beautiful. The punters were trying to unload their bets now; the bookies’ odds of collapse were back to two to one against. “In fact, we are all sluggish and weak, ants and termites compared to the people who built themselves in Far History. We made ourselves this weak on purpose. Because someone thought it was sensible.”

  Hungry in one of the bodies in the bed, Fift got up, padded down the hall, and entered the eating room. Pip was there, in a formal, woven, cream-colored suit-sarong. Ze looked up at Fift. A stranger might have thought ze looked impassive, but Fift could read zir expression: c
old fury.

  Viewership in the goopfield was up to thirty thousand and climbing.

  “Remarkable,” Mother Pip said, to Hrotrun, zir tone perfectly neutral.

  “What?” Hrotrun said, the corners of vir eyes tightening again.

  “A remarkably convenient fantasy,” Pip said. “Elegantly designed. I express my admiration. It allows you to be both fundamentally powerful—because truly you are the last remnant of powerful heroes from the Ages Before the Ages—and at the same time explains away your abject failure as a person in this world. A conspiracy of the mediocre has so completely triumphed over the wonderful that the wonderful are to be pitied. We elide the question of how the mediocre managed this.”

  In the eating room, Pip looked down at zir soup and lifted the bowl to zir lips.

  Hrotrun looked like ve had bitten into a rotten mangareme. “You wouldn’t—”

  “I wouldn’t understand,” said Pip. “Obviously, by definition. Much too sluggish. And I am sure that if you were back in the Ages Before the Ages, they would understand perfectly, and acclaim you as a fellow hero, as opposed to a childless, officially censured coward barely tolerated by vir own cohort who cannot even manage to anonymously beat children and effectively evade discovery.”

  Hrotrun’s lips curled back. “You are lucky you have the protection of being a Staid—”

  “Ah yes, the protection we so kindly accord the sluggish. Well, perhaps you would like to come start an unlicensed riot with any of the adult Vails in my cohort. That would be a convenient way around the fact that you are not worth accompanying to the mats; they could simply beat you senseless in the courtyard. Might give your ratings a boost. And now we must go. Give my regards to the ancient heroes of legend. Fift?” Without another glance at Hrotrun, Pip turned and walked back towards the elevator. Fift followed, forcing zirself not to look back in zir body.

  Pip took a long slurp of soup.

  Over the feed, Hrotrun stood in the middle of the goopfield, quivering. Vir feathers had fanned out in sharp lumps. Ve was not slouching, though. Ve looked wakeful and in pain.

  Bookies’ odds of vir collapse, in the next three months, were even.

  Viewership had peaked at fifty thousand and was gradually trailing off.

  Pip dropped the bowl. It fell to the table and rolled itself into a ball to keep from spilling its contents. Ze stared at Fift.

  Fift swallowed. “Well, um. Thanks, I guess. I guess you . . . handled that.”

  “Is it not clear to you,” Pip said, “that that was a disaster?”

  “Well . . .” Fift coughed. “I mean, clearly at the end there you supplanted vem.”

  “Yes,” Pip said, as if speaking to an infant. “It was I who supplanted vem. Was that the question? Was it in question whether I could supplant a slackwitted, childless, firstborn coward? No, it was not. That was not to be the match, was it, Fift? You, Fift, were to supplant vem. I was to observe mildly with parental pride. My presence was not ideal, but it seemed to be warranted. But Fift, now I have been seen by fifty thousand viewers to engage as an equal with this . . . creature, this anonybodying scrounger. Ve strikes my Staid child in a riot, and I am forced to critique vir crankish power fantasies and . . . to threaten vem—however sarcastically, threaten vem!—with an informal match with your Fathers! And why, Fift? Why has this cohort now engaged adult-to-adult—and traveled to Wallacomp to do so—with a childless residential cohort of fifteen transients in Kumru-abandoned Tentative Scoop?”

  “Because I wouldn’t do what you said,” Fift said sullenly.

  “Is that why? I am not asking you to produce what you think I want to hear, Fift. Think for yourself. I am ready to listen.”

  In the elevator, Pip stood stiffly beside zir amid the strange, rich flowers.

  In the bed, Fift fell asleep (to zir great surprise), plunging into dim dreams of following Shria through an underwater reef: murky water, bright fish, zirself a fish, and Shria, too.

  In the eating room, zir eyes hurt. Ze was tired. Ze sat down and a creaking harness swung over to wrap itself around zir, supporting zir weight. “Yeah,” Fift said. “That’s why. I didn’t do what you said.”

  “It was one question, Fift. Ve only needed to hear the direct, actual question; Do you apologize for intentionally striking me? Ve would have cracked open like a ripe nut.” Pip folded zir sleeve and carefully cleaned the corners of zir mouth with it. “Instead, we have exposed ourselves to more danger, more risk of censure. We cannot be seen to be . . . playing along . . . with these miscreants.”

  “I know,” Fift said.

  They sat in silence for a few moments, and stood in silence in the elevator.

  The bright red, blue, and yellow fish who was Shria turned, flourishing its billowing tail, and was suddenly Hrotrun—brown, spindled, deep, and menacing—in a thick and muddy sea.

  “Well,” said Pip at last, shaking zir head in the eating room. “One down, two to go.”

  14

  A knock on the doorjamb, and then another.

  Father Squell’s voice: “Wake up, little cubblehedge.”

  Fift opened one body’s eyes. Ze’d been sleeping in two bodies at once—which ze didn’t usually do—and coming awake was jarring. Ze faltered on the staircase down to Undersnort, resting a hand on the railing, dizzy for a moment.

  The weight of zir arm on zir other chest; of zir leg across zir other two shins.

  Ze rolled aside, putting blankets and stale air between zir bodies.

  In front of zir, Pip descended, implacably.

  Squell poked a head into the room. “Hello, Fift dear. I’m sorry to wake you. You’ve been asleep since—well, you must have been exhausted.”

  Ze’d been resisting the temptation to look at Shria over the feed. If Shria wanted a break, for them to keep away from each other, fine . . . and as Fift had followed zir silent Mother down the bright white whispermarble stairs, ze’d been able to hold back. Shria had public locations listed now: ve and vir friends had come out of the ludatorium. But so what? Ze had zir own life. Ze didn’t need to watch Shria over the feed.

  Except now ze did. It was different, lying awake in the other two bodies . . . sluggish and vulnerable, flushed from too-warm sleep, the ghost of zir limbs’ pressure lingering against zir skin. Remembering how Shria had embraced zir in the middle of the riot. Vir hard arms pressing zir to vir soft breasts. The beating of vir heart.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Squell said. “I don’t really know if I’m the right one to do it. But . . . well . . . Grobbard can be so . . . formal, and Pip . . . well, I think you’ve had enough of Pip’s scolding for today.” Ve popped another head in the door, leaning vir chin on vir first body’s shoulder, leaning against vemself. Copper spikes, silver spikes. Ve was small—smaller, now, Fift realized, than ze was—and rosy-skinned and soft-curved and swathed in glittery blue fabric. “Besides which, I’m, well, I think, the one who noticed.” Ve looked around the room. “If you want, smoothling, we can blank the house feed in your room so it’s just you and me, and not the rest of your parents . . .”

  Fift’s throat went dry. “What? Why—”

  “I just don’t want to embarrass you. But . . . I’m being silly. Never mind. At this point, none of us want any more feed blackouts!” Ve smiled at vir own witticism, raising vir eyebrows. Ve slipped into the room (copper spikes), kept leaning on the doorway (silver spikes).

  There they were: Shria, Bluey, Stogma, and Vvonda—six bodies, strolling with latterborn ease down the slopeway to Wallacomp. They must have stopped at a spa after the ludatorium: they were cleansed and buffed and oiled, with matching glittery-golden threads braided into their hair.

  Squell stood by the bed, looking as if ve’d like to sit down. Fift sat up in both bodies, scooted to one side, awkwardly straightening the blankets.

  “Fift,” Squell said, “You know we like Shria Qualia Fnax of name registry Digger Chameleon 2. Your other parents and I.”

  “Ok
ay,” Fift said.

  Look closer, though, and the fresh-from-the-spa latterborn ease was thinly spread. Shria kept cracking vir knuckles; Vvonda stood a little too straight. {They look nervous, don’t they?} ze asked zir social nuance agent.

  {They certainly do.} zir social nuance agent sent.

  “But,” Squell said, “your friend is in a difficult situation right now. Social reactancy ratings for vir parental cohort have . . . worsened. To the point where, well . . . I’m sorry, smoothling, but consensus support may be withdrawn. Especially now! A week ago, there might have been complaints and deratings and not much more. But now, after this Unraveling business, the Midwives and deep adjudicators are being rather direct about the idea that reckless behavior can’t be tolerated anymore. Fnax cohort may be disbanded.”

  “But it wasn’t Shria’s fault,” Fift said. “Ve didn’t start it!”

  “Well, perhaps not,” Squell said. Ve cleared vir throat. “It was a difficult situation. But—”

  “If ve hadn’t fought, what would the ratings be like? Any better?”

  “Possibly not,” Squell admitted. “In that case, ve might have been censured for cowardice. People might have said ve was gendering poorly. As things stand . . . well, no one expects vem to have won a fight in such a circumstance, of course. But it’s not wonderful for ratings for a young Vail to look like a victim. Really, once a young Vail is involved in an off-mats fight, there are simply no good options ratings-wise, which is why it’s the parents’ job to . . .” Ve sighed. “In any event, I am not mainly here to talk about how Shria is gendering.”

  “Oh . . .” Fift didn’t like where this was going. “Father Squell, I’m not going to cast Shria to the periphery just because ve’s in trouble. Ve’s my friend. I can’t . . .”

  Squell held up a hand. “Cubblehedge, I understand, and that’s all very praiseworthy. And if the only issue here were ratings, and your desire to be loyal to your friend, I might even agree with you . . . possibly. We’re in a somewhat better position than Fnax cohort. However, that doesn’t mean we can afford extravagant gestures, and . . . that’s not the only issue here.”